Somewhere in Hong Kong, four Kenyan women who flew to the Asian city to work as househelps are living in a dormitory-style cubicle.
They are in a group of nine sharing the cubicle that has been offered by a Christian charity as they await the conclusion of court cases they have filed against their former employers. The five other occupants come from Indonesia and the Philippines.
Hope took them there. In the city that is a special administrative region of China, the minimum and compulsory monthly wage for a househelp from another country is 4,630 Hong Kong dollars, equal to Sh63,242.
Add that to the fact that the employer is supposed to offer accommodation and food and the total is a city that is a coveted destination for people interested in domestic work.
Aware that Hong Kong is an attractive workplace, unscrupulous persons have found ways to make a killing, what led to the four women to go there ending up at the charitable organisation.
They were rescued from different dramatic situations and their stories have one point of convergence: they paid a rogue agent in Hong Kong Sh150,000 to “facilitate” their placement in the city’s homes.
They made the payment before leaving Kenya, unaware that by Hong Kong laws, no foreigner should pay more than 10 per cent of their first month’s pay to be placed. In other words, each of them paid Sh150,000 whereas they should have paid just Sh6,324.
But after securing what looked like a handsome opportunity that would recover the money spent and bring in some more, the situation on the ground was different: harsh working conditions that left them with no option but to quit.
Those who did not quit were pushed out by their employers in what looks like a well-choreographed scheme to take more Kenyans and more Sh150,000 deposits to a market that clearly has enough supply of househelps.
Mr David Bishop, a lawyer and lecturer at the University of Hong Kong, has worked with a number of Kenyan women who have fallen victim.
He told the Nation that he has assisted at least eight Kenyan women who have fallen into the trap. “We know there are dozens more that we have been unable to reach, or who have already left Hong Kong,” he said.
The agent, who exported the Kenyan women, uses the Facebook page named “Talent — Kenya Company Limited”, which is based at Hollywood Plaza in Hong Kong.
The agency says on the page that it “specialises in providing well-trained domestic helpers from Kenya as well as some other parts of Africa”. There is always one suitable for you,” it states in another post targeting Hong Kong residents.
The agent, who uses the alias “Ivy”, had not responded to our requests for a comment by the time of going to press.
Initially, she worked with an agency in Nairobi but quickly abandoned it and started working with two female lawyers in the capital, who helped collect payments from unsuspecting women.
At the cubicle in Hong Kong, one of the Kenyans currently living there is 38-year-old Esther Njenga Wanjiku.
She used to work as an M-Pesa shop attendant at Thika Road Mall before the opportunity came. She would later borrow money from her father to raise the Sh150,000 required.
Esther left Kenya in August 2019. By then, she had a contract indicating that she was to work at one home for two years.
That would bring her at least Sh720,000 a year, and that she saw an opportunity to raise fees for her daughter in college and get her some more money for other expenses.
It was all a pipe dream. By mid-October, she had been ejected from that household and had to seek shelter at the charity.
Life in that household, she told the Nation last week, was a nightmare. It had a father, mother and two children aged nine and seven.
One of the most humiliating things she had to undergo was not directly touching the food she prepares.
“I had to wash utensils and cook for them using gloves. I was never supposed to touch their food with my bare hands. And I was never supposed to eat their food. I had a different fridge for my food,” said Esther.
She also remembers being overworked and denied off-days. Then out of the blue, the employer asked her to pack her bags and head to the agency, from where she could be paid her dues.
Esther suspected a raw deal because she had not even settled down. As she packed her bags, she called Christian Action, the charity currently taking care of them, and they advised her to co-operate and leave the homestead.
When she told her employer that she could involve labour offices, she was reluctant to let her go but she called police, who later took her to the Christian Action premises.
“I’ve been with Christian Action for six months now,” she said. There, they are whiling time away, taking turns to cook.
Another Kenyan who used to live in the cubicle is Grace Mary Wariu, a 26-year-old who left Bahrain in December last year and headed to Hong Kong in January.
Earning Sh63,000 a month was a better deal than the one she had while working as a househelp in the Middle East.
Even though she had her doubts along the way, she eventually paid the Sh150,000 to the Hong Kong agency and subsequently got her visa and plane ticket.
Grace travelled to Hong Kong on January 10. There, she faced the shock of her life because contrary to what the agent had promised, there was no employer waiting for her.
The agent was to be her employer and she remembers facing a difficult time. She was supposed to prepare meals but never eat, and her host was always quarrelsome.
For a sleeping place, she had to climb a cupboard. For meals, she was only given rice or macaroni, which she was to boil and only add salt.
Moreover, she was never allowed to use her phone in a house that had several surveillance cameras.
She could not take it any more by the second week. On the morning of January 26, she left the homestead and, through connections she had made before travelling, found herself at the Christian Action facility.
The charity organisation has a department dedicated to foreign domestic workers who have been mistreated. It offers them shelter, food, counselling, education and other kinds of assistance.
Grace weighed the pros and cons and reasoned that it would be more costly to stay there to wait for the finalisation of a court case.
After having her former employer compelled to pay her ticket back to Kenya, to pay her for the duration of her work and make other payments, she returned to Kenya on March 24.
She is currently in quarantine at the Kenya Medical Training College in Nairobi. “I have to move on because I don’t have a choice. It’s hard but I need to do it,” she said.
One of the striking elements of the women’s story is the lawyers that the Hong Kong agent worked with.
Esther made her initial dealings with lawyer Joan Nthenya, through whom she paid Sh73,000 to the agent; while Grace paid her Sh150,000 through lawyer Euphrasia Ziriba. The lawyers were collecting money on behalf of the agent and sending it to her.
Both lawyers admitted having offered services to the Hong Kong agent but said they terminated the association once dealings with the agent became suspect.
Ms Nthenya said she first met the agent in late 2018 and that by June last year, she had stopped associating with her.
“When I found out that she doesn’t want to comply with [househelp agency] rules, I stopped dealing with her immediately,” said Ms Nthenya.
Ms Ziriba said she cut ties with the recruiter in February “after discovering it could be a sham”. Ms Ziriba also denied being part of a con scheme.
“I didn’t facilitate anything. Because if I had sourced them, that is a different story. I didn’t source them. I was doing my legal work, guiding them through contracts — of which they were even paying for those legal services,” she said.
At one point, Ms Ziriba noted, she refunded money to Kenyans who had paid their first Sh73,000 awaiting processing of documents so that they could later top it up to reach Sh150,000.
According to Mr Bishop, the lawyer-cum-lecturer who has been assisting distressed Kenyan women seek justice, they have been pushing to have the agency closed — like they have done with others that have been importing househelps into Hong Kong from Indonesia and the Philippines.
“I believe they received their licence in 2017. They have got away with charging Kenyans for a few reasons. One is that they were doing things pretty quietly for a while and no one really knew they were doing it,” he said.
Mr Bishop advised people to first research before signing up. “If Kenyans are offered a job in Hong Kong, then they should know that Hong Kong agencies are not allowed to charge them large job placement fees. The minimum wage and other laws for Hong Kong are posted pretty clearly, so do your research and make sure that the things the agency is telling you are true,” he said.
“The current minimum wage for a foreign domestic worker is HK$4,630, so if (she) had that salary, her job placement fee cannot be more than HK$463,” he said.
By Sunday Nation.
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